Summer slowly comes to an end and while for many of you that means back to work, we look back at a busy summer at Laika which we used to grow together as a work family.

As some of you might know, Laika is less than a year old and has been growing rapidly; we started in September 2018 with a team of three consultants who knew each other from their previous jobs and are now a “pack” of eight people. Over the past few months, we gained household names such as SumUp, Seedrs, Raisin and Chatterbug as clients to work with us - and we moved to a shiny, big and new office right next to Alexanderplatz.

All of these challenges and changes brought alongside the fun and excitement also a certain growing pain. Processes needed to be established, team members had to get used to each other and the dogs had to learn that the delivery guys are not worthy of a barking concert!

In order to take a breath and grow together as a work family, we took three days in July to spend time at a workation retreat (yes that’s a thing now!) in beautiful Brandenburg. Naturally, we used our time at coconat to discuss long term virtues, such as Laika's mission, vision and values. But it also became a great chance to get to know each other better and to relax from the busy Berlin agency life that sometimes can take a toll on you. We learned how important it is to take a step back from the day-to-day activities to learn and laugh together. We came to the conclusion that we want to work for even more meaningful and game-changing ideas as we do today and that we will further work on communicating our values such as fairness, integrity, passion and positivity internally and externally.

Returning refreshed, we came back and put all of this to work to make our August office warming a success for guests and team alike. And what a party we had as you can see in the pictures below! Preppers that we are, we still have about 10 cases of beer left and 100 Laika Glitzermate to be emptied. Therefore, if you missed our party, come by for a visit and enjoy a drink with us on the house!

While the Berlin summer heat is threatening to roast us this year, we had an equally fiery second quarter of 2019.

Before even our first birthday, our agency has secured the communication budgets of an additional six well-known startups! As we are quite proud, here is a bit more information on our new clients and why they chose Laika:

In the Fintech space, Berlin based Raisin / WeltSparen has chosen Laika to provide support for B2C and corporate communications in German-speaking countries. WeltSparen - internationally known under the Raisin brand - is the leading provider of simple savings and investment products. The platform offers access to attractive and deposit-backed overnight and fixed-term deposits from all over Europe as well as globally diversified and cost-effective ETF portfolios. Laika was brought on board to increase consumer awareness of the offering and the fintech brand. "We are delighted to be working with Laika Communications, an agency that bridges the gap between complex technology and specialist topics and consumer communication. With their support, we want to raise awareness for more transparency and attractive financial products, to show better alternatives and above all, how easy and fair saving and investing can be for consumers today," explains Nicole Scheplitz, Head of Communications at Raisin.

The leading equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs also hired Laika for its communications in German-speaking countries. In addition to strategic public relations work, we will handle event PR and speaker placements for the Seedrs Germany office. Kyrill Zlobenko, DACH Regional Manager at Seedrs, says: “We’re delighted to be working with Laika to support our European entrepreneurs. They bring with them bounds of energy and experience in executing PR strategies, and we’re looking forward to seeing them help build the brands of the startups that have raised on Seedrs.”

SumUp's payment experts rely us to raise the companies profile in German-language publications to attract even more individual entrepreneurs and small companies to its convenient and secure mobile card payment solution. Headquartered in London and with twelve offices worldwide, including Berlin, SumUp currently employs 1,300 people and has an annual turnover of 200 million Euro. "We are happy to be partnering with Laika in Germany in order to increase brand awareness and bring card acceptance to merchants no matter how small, unique or mobile the business is. Laika's expert and bespoke approach was something that suited SumUp's PR strategy in the DACH region perfectly", says Arsenia Nikolaeva, PR & Communications Lead at SumUp.

The Austrian job platform WisR, which enables companies to connect with and hire senior talent, engages us for its launch communication in Germany. WisRs mission is it to retain the expert knowledge and know-how of senior talent for today's job market. At the same time the enterprise offers people 60+ the chance to further actively participate in the workspace, develop their knowledge and experience while connecting them with companies in need of their qualifications . "It was clear to us that we needed a strong partner for PR and content to enter the market. Above all, because our topic requires a lot of awareness raising and education. It's great that LAIKA works super interdisciplinary and covers a really good mix of topics," Klaudia Bachinger, founder and managing director of WisR, is pleased about the cooperation.

With Chatterbug, an American-German startup relies on our services. The online language learning system combines online self-study with effective one-to-one video instruction by native-speaker tutors. The startup, founded by the former Github co-founders, has offices in San Francisco and Berlin and relies on Laika to expand its own profile after its launch in Germany a year and a half ago. "We're so excited to partner with Laika to get the word out about Chatterbug! In choosing a communications partner, we were looking for a team with great press experience, tons of creative energy, and a passion for both education and technology. We think Laika is the perfect fit to help us tell our story." says Liz Clinkenbeard, co-founder at Chatterbug.

Last but not least, the French startup KYMONO is also expanding our portfolio. KYMONO's "culture designers" launched in Germany in June and rely on our event and PR expertise to enter the local market. "We enjoy Laika's ability to adapt to our expansion needs from hands-on to strategic actions. Furthermore, their expertise in international business and fashion is what we were looking for. We really appreciate the mix of professionalism, flexibility and fun in their work." says Raky Sall Country Manager Germany at KYMONO.

The red and exhausted faces of fellow Berliners tell us summer has arrived and with it came some sweet changes for our Laika team. One of it being that we have a new colleague amongst us. Isabelle is the newest addition to our PR squad and we are really happy to have her with us. Because of her German and French roots, Isabelle happens to be fluent in both languages. She is a wonderful fit for Laika as tech and especially smart cities and consumer electronics are topics she takes a serious interest in. She studied communications and international relations respectively in Lille and Strasbourg. This is also where she started to help organize events like exhibitions, jubilees or student parties. Events also played a big part during her time at Business France Deutschland so it follows that this is going to be her working emphasis here at Laika. But of course, she is skilled beyond this particular part of public relations. Isabelle is also going to manage social media endeavors and finetune her video creation and editing skills.

More about Isabelle

To round off her profile we let you in on some of her interests beyond work. One of her lil’ hobbies is hunting down unexpected or cool new places in Berlin and elsewhere with the help of Google maps. Generally, she likes being on the move always looking out for new travel destinations, different cultures and other things that need discovering. After one of her expeditions, she recovers by doing yoga or climbing up walls aka bouldering.

When Isabelle is not helping bees by drilling holes into stones, she helps our clients to get more attention through (event) PR.

New Office at Klosterstraße

We had a wonderful start at the Wonder Women’s Coworking in Prenzlauer Allee. But no matter how often we counted - we always ended up having four tables and five people. So our boss Ela went office hunting and closed the deal on an awesome lofty office in Klosterstraße, right next to Alexanderplatz. The building itself is a bit rough around the edges but we like it that way. It’s somewhat reminiscent of pre investor times - before the poshness wave hit Berlin. Good old industrial style but with a hell of a wonderful view and lots of space. Rotes Rathaus, Französischer & Berliner Dom, Nikolai Kirche we can see it all directly from our desks and we love that change. With a lot of screen time every day it is such a welcome new asset to be able to let the eyes wander. So we found our perfect mixture of a lot of space, a wonderful view and a bit of down to earth GDR charm. There is some extra space for future colleagues left also. So don’t hesitate and join us!

Save the date: Office warming party will follow on August 8th!

Anna is waiting for your content challenges while Niko is waiting for more cuddles.

Laika is now officially half a year old and we surely had a rocket launch start: With recent client wins and a strong new business pipeline ahead of us, we’ve been continuing to look out for experienced colleagues to further help us build out our services.

And sometimes the answer is right under your nose: As of yesterday we welcomed the content and social wizard Anna Tremper to the team. Anna joins Laika after previously having worked together with us as a freelancer on accounts such as Liechtenstein Life and prosperity. Anna is a content allrounder, great copywriter and social media expert. She currently experiments a lot with video formats and in her free time learns how to code. A match made in heaven for our tech clients who are frequently asking us for more content and social media marketing support.

To celebrate Anna’s start the team will compete in a Berlin company pub quiz this Thursday. Watch out for team “Space Dogs” and welcome Anna to the pack!

At Laika we are mostly dog people, but the Viber LegCat won our hearts immediately.

Today we’re happy to announce another great client win for our growing team and portfolio. Since beginning of March we’re officially working for the messaging app Viber.

With Viber, more than one billion users worldwide communicate with their friends and families free of charge via high-quality audio and video calls, messaging and much more. All Viber calls and chats are protected by end-to-end encryption, so users can rest assured that their conversations are always secure. Viber is part of Rakuten, Inc. and aims to increase its profile among German consumers. We at Laika will handle all B2C and B2B communication for the messaging provider in German-speaking regions.

"We chose Laika because the team's tech expertise and approach convinced us. In addition, Laika are team players who already successfully collaborate on other accounts with our existing agencies from the USA and UK - another reason to put our German communication in Laika's hands", explains Debbi Dougherty, VP, B2B Marketing at Viber.

If you haven’t checked out the Viber app yet, you can download it here for iOS and Android.

Something round, something colourful and something to share: Donuts! This is how we welcomed our new / old colleague Fatma last Tuesday for her onboarding week at Laika.

Fatma will be familiar to those of you who know our team: In fact she and our founder Ela share a long history of working together on the navabi account. Now Fatma made the rather unusual move from the client to the agency side to dive right into new exciting topics and technologies. At navabi Fatma has been an experienced in-house communications manager. At Laika Fatma will focus on lifestyle and ecommerce accounts as well as influencer marketing. Additionally, Fatma is currently doing an advanced training in systemic coaching and change management. Besides those work related fields, her hobbies are travel and food.

In order to kick things off we spent last week together in Berlin for onboarding and catching up on clients, projects and agency life as Fatma will work remotely from Aachen. While this will of course bring some challenges, we believe in flexible work models being the future and therefore experiment a lot with new work concepts and ideas. And the most important: We believe in people who care for their work and each other - two qualities we surely found in Fatma.